Amnesty International

AI is on the wrong side of the Syrian conflict, its reports sounding like US and scoundrel media propaganda.

Its 1915-16 annual report on Syria was a litany of misinformation and Big Lies, claiming “(g)overnment forces and non-state armed groups committed war crimes, other violations of international humanitarian law and gross human rights abuses with impunity in the internal armed conflict.”

Apparent war crimes committed by US and NATO troops in Afghanistan have gone uninvestigated, leaving the families of thousands of the victims without justice, Amnesty International said in a new report.

“Thousands of Afghans have been killed or injured by US forces since the invasion, but the victims and their families have little chance of redress. The US military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” said Richard Bennett, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director.

“None of the cases that we looked into – involving more than 140 civilian deaths – were prosecuted by the US military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored.”

MOSCOW — The Russian authorities on Monday raided the local headquarters of the human rights group Amnesty International, the latest in a continuing series of office searches intended to put pressure on nongovernmental groups.The head of Amnesty’s office in Russia, Sergei Nikitin, said in a telephone interview that officials from the general prosecutor’s offices and from the tax police arrived unannounced on Monday morning to conduct what they described as an “audit” and demanded a list of documents, most of which Mr. Nikitin said were already on file with the government.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

A new film, “Compliance,” examines “the human desire to follow and obey authority.” Liberal institutions, such as the media, universities, federal courts, and human rights organizations, which have traditionally functioned as checks on the blind obedience to authority, have in our day gone over to power’s side. The subversion of these institutions has transformed them from checks on power into servants of power. The result is the transformation of culture from the rule of law to unaccountable authority resting on power maintained by propaganda.

Obama is a despicable patsy, a front man for powerful private interests, and Democrats should be totally ashamed to have elevated such a cowardly lowlife. But as awful as Obama is, a vote for Republicans is a vote for Hitler or Stalin. Indeed, the election of Romney and Ryan would be worse than either.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The latest “rights group” to jump on Russia’s President Putin about Pussy Riot is RootsAction. Following the propaganda line that Washington has established, RootsAction’s appeal for money and petition signers states that the three Russian women were sentenced to two years in prison “for the ‘crime’ of performing a song against Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in a Moscow church.”

This statement is a propagandistic misrepresentation of the offense for which the women were tried and convicted.

Amnesty International on Thursday urged Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia to arrest former US president George W. Bush for violating international torture laws, during his African tour this week.

Bush is touring the countries through to Monday to promote efforts to fight cervical and breast cancers, and Amnesty said the three nations have an obligation to arrest him under international law.

“All countries to which George W. Bush travels have an obligation to bring him to justice for his role in torture,” said Amnesty’s senior legal adviser Matt Pollard.

“International law requires that there be no safe haven for those responsible for torture; Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia must seize this opportunity to fulfil their obligations and end the impunity George W. Bush has so far enjoyed.”

“Amnesty International recognizes the value of raising awareness about cervical and breast cancer in Africa, the stated aim of the visit, but this cannot lessen the damage to the fight against torture caused by allowing someone who has admitted to authorising water-boarding to travel without facing the consequences prescribed by law,” the group said in a statement.

Amnesty made a similar appeal to Canada in October when Bush visited British Columbia for an economic summit.

LONDON (Reuters) – Human rights group Amnesty International said on Friday its sources had said Libyan security forces had shot dead at least 46 people in the past three days.

Amnesty said in a statement sources at al-Jala hospital in Benghazi had reported 28 deaths and more than 110 people injured in Thursday’s protests in the city, and at least three further deaths on Friday.

Local human rights activists reported at least 15 deaths on Thursday during protests in the nearby town of Al Bayda, an Amnesty International spokeswoman said.

“This alarming rise in the death toll, and the reported nature of the victims’ injuries, strongly suggests that security forces are permitted use lethal force against unarmed protesters calling for political change,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“The Libyan authorities must immediately rein in their security forces. Those responsible for unlawful killings and excessive force — both the direct perpetrators and those who gave the orders — must be identified and brought to justice,” he said in the statement.

How will things look like in the coming financial-economic collapse in America (and Europe)?

WASHINGTON — An Amnesty report laid bare Wednesday horrific accounts of rape in Haiti’s squalid refugee camps a year after a devastating quake left many struggling to rebuild their shattered lives.

They are women like Guerline, who two months after losing her husband when their home crumbled to the ground in the devastating quake, had to watch as her teenage daughter was raped in a makeshift tarpaulin camp in Port-au-Prince.

“Four men raped her. She is 13 years old,” Guerline told Amnesty International researchers, who compiled the report after interviewing more than 50 women and girls in Haiti’s post-quake camps.

“They told me that if I talked about it, they would kill me. They said that if I went to the police, they would shoot me dead.

“I’m scared. There is nowhere safe where I can live, so I had to keep quiet,” said Guerline, who, like all the women interviewed for the report, was given a false name to protect her from reprisals.

Guerline was raped on the same night as her daughter by hooded men in the tent city.She can’t get the events of that terrible night out of her head.

Amnesty said little is being done to help her and other victims of rape and sexual violence, old woes for Haiti that worsened after the earthquake killed over 230,000 people, injured 300,000 others and flattened large tracts of the capital.

Human rights group calls on international community to help end regime’s ‘systematic neglect’ and prevent humanitarian disaster

Many children in North Korea are at risk of serious malnourishment. (AP)

A desperate picture of the health of North Korea’s population is painted by a report describing a country of stunted children, where the hungry eat poisonous plants and pigfeed, amputations are conducted without anaesthetic and doctors are paid in cigarettes.

Almost two decades after it was hit by a famine that killed an estimated 2 million people, North Korea again faces widespread food shortages and is unable to provide even basic healthcare for its people, according to the report, published today by Amnesty International.

The human rights organisation accuses the North Korean regime of systematic neglect and calls on the international community to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

Based on interviews with aid workers and North Korean defectors, the report says hospitals lack essential equipment and drugs, which forces the sick to treat themselves with medicines bought from markets. Major operations are routinely conducted without anaesthetic, while malnutrition has paved the way for a tuberculosis epidemic.

“North Korea has failed to provide for the most basic health and survival needs of its people,” said Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Asia-Pacific region. “This is especially true of those who are too poor to pay for medical care.”

According to the latest World Health Organisation (WHO) figures, North Korea spent just ¢50 (32p) per person a year on healthcare – a tenth as much as Burma.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades

A ruptured pipeline burns in a Lagos suburb after an explosion in 2008 which killed at least 100 people. (Reuters)

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.

The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.

Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. “We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots,” said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. “This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months.”

That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

Al Gore is an elite puppet like Bush and Obama. He has been selected by the elite to brainwash the people with the global warming scam in order to push through with the elite agenda of world government, the ‘New World Order’.

Environmentalists condemn former vice-president for letting controversial company fund Life Earth

Al Gore, the self-styled squeakiest-clean and deepest-green politician in American history, has some explaining to do this weekend. His environmental organisation has taken money to raise awareness about the need for clean water from a controversial chemicals company.

Dow Chemical, the US firm, is sponsoring Life Earth events in 150 cities today. The event aims to raise money for clean water programmes. Research by environmental organisations has found dangerous levels of highly toxic chemicals in rivers, lakes and other water supplies close to several other factories owned by Dow and its subsidiaries in countries including the United States, Brazil and South Africa.

Dow’s factories at its global headquarters in Midland, Michigan, have been accused of contaminating the region, including the Tittabawassee River floodplains, with high levels of dioxin – one of the “dirty dozen” most dangerous chemicals. In 2007, the highest level of dioxin contamination ever measured by the US Environmental Protection Agency was found in the Michigan Saginaw River. Residents are advised to avoid contact with river sediments and not to eat locally caught fish.

Campaigners are outraged by what they call Dow’s “blatant attempt” to paint itself as a green company and divert attention from the Bhopal scandal, where 25 years after the 1984 disaster at the plant (then owned by Union Carbide) thousands of villagers are still forced to use contaminated water which causes birth defects, cancer and skin disorders.

Live Earth, which has accumulated celebrity supporters and thousands of activists worldwide since its climate change concert in 2007, has been criticised by campaigners for joining forces with a company which has a track record of, at best, being slow to clean up toxic spills that pollute water, damage ecosystems and endanger lives.

Three weeks ago, Amnesty International asked Live Earth to reconsider the sponsorship unless Dow publicly agreed to clean up Bhopal. Live Earth did not respond.

Amnesty International may be best known to American audiences for bringing to light horror stories overseas such as the disappearance of political activists in Argentina or the abysmal conditions inside South African prisons under apartheid. But in a new report on pregnancy and childbirth care in the U.S., Amnesty details the maternal health care crisis in this country as part of a systemic violation of women’s rights.

The report, titled “Deadly Delivery,” notes that the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the U.S. is ﬁve times greater than in Greece, four times greater than in Germany, and three times greater than in Spain. Every day in the U.S., more than two women die of pregnancy-related causes, with the maternal mortality ratio doubling from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006. (And as shocking as these figures are, Amnesty notes that the actual number of maternal deaths in the U.S. may be a lot higher since there are no federal requirements to report these outcomes and since data collection at the state and local levels needs to be improved.) “In the U.S., we spend more than any country on health care, yet American women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes than in 40 other countries,” says Nan Strauss, the report’s co-author, who spent two years investigating the issue of maternal mortality worldwide. “We thought that was scandalous.” (See the most common hospital mishaps.)

“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.”

Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.

Also present was Amnesty International’s Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report “Jailed Without Justice” and said in an interview, “It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn’t believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren’t anything wrong.”

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants–nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

“All detainees in Afghanistan are entitled to minimum protections, including the right to legal counsel, and to be able to challenge the legal and factual basis for the detention before an independent and impartial tribunal,” three leading rights groups said in a statement.
“The U.S. reforms still fall short of providing detainees with those rights,” Amnesty International, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch said in the statement.
Source: Reuters

Change you can believe in!

A U.S. Public Affairs officer stood in the recreation yard in the newly constructed “Detention Facility in Parwan” during a media tour in Bagram, Afghanistan, Nov. 15, 2009. (Wall Street Journal)

BAGRAM AIR FIELD — The new US prison for captured insurgents lies in the middle of a former Soviet minefield, on the northeastern side of the main American military base in Afghanistan.

Cleared of a deadly menace which still lurks elsewhere along Bagram’s perimeter, the complex of cinderblock, containers, Quonset huts and high barbed-wire fences will hold 675 inmates by the year end.

This number can be increased to 1,140 inmates.

The 67-million-dollar facility will be run by around 700 military personnel working for the Joint Task Force 435, created by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates “to take responsibility for all US detainee operations in Afghanistan”.

U.S. helicopter took off from the Bagram Air Base. (Wall Street Journal)

Officially known as Detention Facility in Parwan, after the surrounding province, the prison will replace that now run by only 200 guards in the centre of Bagram, a rapidly growing garrison city of 24,000.

Most inmates will be held in communal cells with a capacity of 20 detainees with, on average, 40 square feet (3.7 square metres) of individual space. On arrival, each will be issued a green blanket, a prayer mat, a white prayer cap and a copy of the Koran.

Detainees may, however, be segregated into individual cells for disciplinary reasons, but for never more than 30 days at a stretch.

Work camps! Looks like the Israeli government has learned from history.

The government is considering establishing work camps in the south of the country, where illegal migrant workers will receive shelter, food and medical care, Army Radio reported Wednesday. In exchange, illegal migrants would perform manual labor outside the camps, but would not earn a salary.

They would stay at the camp until their asylum claims are decided, which could take months or years.

The proposal, part of the effort to address the problems posed by illegal migrants, would place asylum seekers at jobs in communities in the Negev and Arava. Their salaries would go to the state, in order to fund the camps.

Much of the land cut off by the West Bank barrier is land with good access to a major aquifer

Israeli military operations have damaged Palestinian water infrastructure, including $6m worth during the Cast Lead operation in Gaza last winter

The Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza has “exacerbated what was already a dire situation” by denying many building materials needed for water and sewage projects.

The report also noted that the Palestinian water authorities have been criticised for bad management, quoting one audit that described the sector as in “total chaos”.

“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera said.

“Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water.”

Human Rights Organization Reiterates Call for Detainees to be Tried in U.S. Federal Courts

WASHINGTON, May 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — In response to President Barack Obama restarting the military commissions at the U.S.-controlled detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Amnesty International’s executive director Larry Cox issued the following statement:

“President Obama is reinstating the same deeply-flawed military commissions that in June 2008 he called an ‘enormous failure.’ In one swift move, Obama both backtracks on a major campaign promise to change the way the United States fights terrorism and undermines the nation’s core respect for the rule of law by sacrificing due process for political expediency.

“Whatever revisions the Obama administration has made to the commissions do not change the fact that the commissions do not provide an adequate standard of justice for the detainees nor the victims of terrorism — they merely mock the U.S. Constitution, international laws and undermine fundamental human rights standards.

In the dying days of the Bush administration, and a week before Israel launched an aerial bombing campaign, followed by a land invasion of the Gaza Strip, the U.S. military shipped 989 containers of munitions to Israel.

Each container was 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes. The shipment reportedly reached Israel last month at Ashod, 40 kiometres north of Gaza. The huge arsenal of munitions will replenish those expended in the Gaza War.

According to Amnesty International in the UK, the shipment included white phosphorous.

The international organization says 300 of the containers had been unloaded at Ashod in March by a German cargo ship, Wehr Elb.

“We are sure that the consignment contained arms and munitions.” We have a strong suspicion that it contained white phosphorous which has been used against civilians in Gaza,” Brian Wood, head of Arms Control Campaign at Amnesty International in London said late this week.

“The cargo ship had been chartered and controlled by US Military Sealift Command. It left the USA for Israel on December 20, one week before the start of Israeli attacks on Gaza. The vessel was carrying 989 containers of munitions, each of them 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes,” he said.

“The world community including the Palestinians should be able to know where the remaining 680 containers on board the Wehr Elbe have gone and why the US is not transparent about the final destination of the dangerous cargo.

“A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to Amnesty International that “the unloading of the entire US munitions shipment was successfully completed at Ashdod on March 22,” Wood pointed out.